TIM PAGE "Big Moments"

© tim page

A picture is worth a thousand words. Today, maybe it is worth a billion pixels. A photo freezes the moment, locks it into our consciousness. The next commercial on TV dis-focuses us, to consume for happiness. Reality is binned, condemned to the cutting room floor with the caution that we might find it disturbing.

Peace and happiness are found within; by following the path of awareness and compassion. A difficult task in this fraught age of corporate power and competition. The inhumanity and horror of conflict are never more than a station break away - Iraq is almost conducted like an American football game. Never drawn. Only won.

In war there are few victors - only victims; both the shooter and the shot. It is mainly the innocent and civilians who become collateral damage. we are discouraged from pursuing their plight. They are neither fashionable nor foxy.

However, war is imbued with an insane glamour, fatal fascination, and an edge. The edge has that intrigue - the cross over of life to death, the big mystery around which we create religion, creed, dogma and hopefully philosophy and faith. It is this faith in life that these images are dedicated in a sutra or psalm to our survivability. The path is the middle way, the equilibrium found in the teachings and practice described by the Gautama Buddha over two and a half millennia ago. This philosophy enshrines the like principals found in all faiths, expressed so succinctly in the prose of Rabindranath Tagore.

I subscribe to no religion, creed or sect; only to the beauty of nature and the life that lies therein.

Tim Page

© tim page

Tim Page left England at 17 to travel across Europe, the Middle East and to India and Nepal. He found himself in Laos at the time of the civil war and ended up working as a stringer for United Press International.
From there he moved on to Saigon where he covered the Vietnam War for the next five years working largely on assignment for TIME-LIFE, UPI, PARIS MATCH and ASSOCIATED PRESS. He also found time to cover the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967.
The role of war-photographer suited Page s craving for danger and excitement. He became an iconic photographer of the Vietnam War and his pictures were the visual inspiration for many films of the period. The photo-journalist in "Apocalypse Now", played by Dennis Hopper was based on Page.
The Vietnam War was the first and last war where there was no censorship, the military actively encouraged press involvement and Page went everywhere, covering everything. He was wounded four times, once by "friendly fire" and the last time was when he jumped out of a helicopter to help load the wounded and the person in front of him stepped on a landmine. He was pronounced DOA at the hospital. Extensive Neuro-surgery left him hemiplegic for a year.
Tim no longer covers wars. He freelances from Brisbane and has taken up a position as Adjunct Professor of Photojournalism at Griffith University. He regularly exhibits his work and continues to proactively promote peace.

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